


My Youth is Yours

by flower_child



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, High School AU, Modern
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-10 20:43:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5600182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flower_child/pseuds/flower_child
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Modern high school AU - There are two things in the world that are difficult for Delphine Cormier, and they are driving and the hideous English combination of a consonant plus an "r." Both are put to the test in one date night with the one and only Cosima Niehaus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Youth is Yours

“Delphine’s mother and I, we are so lucky that you have learned to drive, Cosima!” Mr. Cormier chuckled in a heavy French accent, clapping his impatient daughter on the shoulder. “Otherwise she might never get to the library, and where would her grades be then!”

_“Oui, Papa…”_ Delphine said, placating—they heard this speech twice a week when Cosima picked Delphine up for their ‘library’ trips (or so they told M. and Mme. Cormier). After the first few, Delphine had stopped reminding him that in France, kids had to wait until they were _eighteen_ to get their license, so why have made the effort before? and at this point, Cosima just laughed along.

“Well, we’d better get going,” Cosima grinned up to the towering Mr. Cormier. “Big biology test tomorrow.”

_“D’accord, d’accord,”_ Delphine’s father assented, supervising them out the door. “Make sure she passes, Cosima!”

Cosima smiled. “I think it’ll be the other way around tonight, Mr. Cormier…”

_“Ciao, Papa!”_ Delphine called out the door, slinging her hand through Cosima’s elbow and resting her head on her girlfriend’s shoulder the moment they hit the walkway.

“Where to?” Cosima asked as Delphine maneuvered her long legs into the passenger’s seat of Cosima’s purple Volkswagen beetle.

“Euh,” she mumbled, still trying to cram herself and her backpack into the small space. “Go towards the library so Maman et Papa don’t get suspicious.”

This was the only way Delphine could get out of the house without question—schoolwork. Their system of deception worked—over the past 3 months they’d managed to sneak out two or three nights a week together, sometimes _actually_ going to the library because they both wanted to, you know, go to college. Other times they just drove around, sometimes stopping to engage in Perfectly Appropriate Activities, sometimes going to dinner or back to Cosima’s place. Once they went hiking, but that’s a story for a different time.

Tonight, Cosima steered down the slowly darkening subdivision, fiddling with the control panel until Delphine spoke.

“Cosima?”

“Mmhmm?” She glanced to the passenger’s seat to find Delphine looking directly at her, eyes wide. Cosima furrowed her eyebrows, concerned. “Everything okay?”

“Yes, yes, of course…” she trailed off, seemingly steeling herself for something. “I was just wondering…if you could teach me how to drive.”

Cosima raised her eyebrows. “Teach you how to _drive?”_

“If you don’t want to, that’s fine—I mean I’ve started learning with Papa but you know, I need more practice, I mean I’m seventeen and I still can’t drive so I was thinking—”

“Definitely.”

Delphine’s eyes lit up. “Really? You want to?”

“Sure,” Cosima laughed. “What could go wrong?”

 

As it turned out, that was the _wrong_ question to ask.

_“Delphine!”_ Cosima shouted five stressful minutes later, clinging to her armrest and the door and Jesus’ welcoming hand as her girlfriend slammed on the brake. “Babe, there’s a _car_ coming!”

“Sorry, _sorry_!”

Safely stopped behind the solid white line separating them and their fate, Delphine rested her head on the top of the wheel.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking,” she muttered.

Cosima found Delphine’s clammy hand still clinging to the wheel and held it. “Don’t worry about it. Look at me. It’s fine. Let’s just start somewhere else. Back up and we’ll go around these side streets.”

Delphine set her jaw, put the car in reverse, and maneuvered her way back to the safety of residential neighborhoods.

“Okay, so just turn right up here,” Cosima instructed as they crawled down Jackson St. at 14 miles per hour.

Delphine nodded and, upon reaching the intersection…

Turned.

And immediately came to a screeching halt.

“Did I do it?” Delphine asked, glancing over at Cosima.

“You did it!” Cosima exclaimed. “You just want to accelerate once you come out of the turn because there’s people behind us who want to kill you right now but otherwise it was great!”

Cosima shook her head, grinning at the irony of it all as Delphine sped down the darkening street. Her girlfriend could take the derivative of anything you handed her in seconds flat and beat the shit out of any stoichiometry problem to come her way in record time, but ask her to make a left turn and she would freeze like an antelope caught in the Ice Age.

“Delphine, just look both ways and if nobody’s coming, _turn.”_

“What if someone’s coming from the other direction?” came the panicked Delphine.

“There _isn’t._ You have time.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. _Go.”_

“No, someone’s coming.”

“They’re a quarter mile away. Delphine, I love you, but you need to turn _now.”_

Cosima pretended not to see the grin playing across Delphine’s lips at her words as her girlfriend said, “Okay.”

And made the left turn.

“You did it!” Cosima shouted, bouncing in her seat. “You turned! I thought we were gonna be there until the second coming of Christ but you _turned!”_

“I did!” Delphine exclaimed, seemingly unaware of how fast she was going.

“Babe,” Cosima warned. “Delphine, it’s a red light.”

“What?”

“Delphine, you need to stop, _now.”_

_“Merde.”_

Delphine slammed on the brakes, sending Cosima flying forward in her seat and back against the headrest with a loud _thunk_.

“Oh my god,” Delphine shrieked. “Are you okay? Cosima?”

“I’ll live,” Cosima replied, chuckling. “Okay, the light’s green.”

“Oh my god,” Delphine repeated. “I’m pulling over, I’m gonna kill both of us.”

They ended up in a church parking lot, Delphine with her head rested once more on the steering wheel and Cosima rubbing her back.

“Babe, don’t worry about it,” she soothed. “Everybody’s kinda shitty when they start out.”

“I could’ve _killed_ you,” Delphine whispered, looking up at Cosima.

“Well, here I am. Don’t worry about it,” she repeated.

Delphine sat up straight, and Cosima was surprised to see tears in her eyes. “What if I had, though?”

“What if you had what?”

“What if I had killed you?”

“Delphine, don’t say that.” Cosima took her girlfriend’s hands across the small space, rubbing them with her thumbs. “I’m right here, okay? I’ll always be here.”

“What if you’re not?” Tears threatened to spill over the bright blue eyes. “Cosima, I don’t know if I can do it without you—”

Cosima shook her head, feeling tears obstructing her own throat. “You won’t ever have to. Come here…”

She took Delphine’s jaw and brought her lips to her own across the car. She felt Delphine’s soft fingers in her dreads, then shivered as they skated down her spine to rest on her hips. Cosima momentarily cursed herself—she’d actually intended on getting work done tonight, but Delphine’s persistent lips now trailing down her neck easily wiped any intent of productivity from her mind.

No longer able to stand the distance, Cosima broke away for a moment and repeated, “Come here” in a whisper.

They’d pulled this type of stunt before, but never with Delphine in the driver’s seat. Nevertheless, and after much effort from both parties, Delphine’s long legs were soon straddled across Cosima’s in the passenger’s seat—

Three sharp raps rang out from the driver’s side window.

Delphine jumped backwards with a yelp, banging her head on the roof of the car. Cosima gasped, looking out the slightly foggy window as Delphine tried desperately to wedge her way onto the seat.

_“Shit,”_ Cosima hissed, hurriedly leaning over to the driver’s door and rolling down the window. “Hello?”

“Hello, ladies,” a weary man’s voice said. “I’m Pastor Greg from the, uh, church.”

Cosima saw a dark frame gesture to the large building from which, she saw now, people were trickling out.

“S-sorry,” she stuttered. “We’ll get out. We thought there wasn’t anyone here—”

“God is always here,” he advised, peering into the car to find a horrified Delphine. “Here’s my card.”

He slipped a business card into the car, Cosima taking it with shaking fingers.

“If you ever want to change your ways…it’s not too late. Come find Jesus,” the pastor said quietly.

“W-we’re good, but thanks, we’ll get out of your way now.”

Cosima never knew she could drive so fast as when she left Pastor Greg in the dust of the church, Delphine laughing uncontrollably in the passenger’s seat.

“Come find Jesus,” she repeated in an excellently French impersonation of the pastor. “Renounce the homosexual lifestyle!”

Cosima cackled, speeding down 7th Street and trying to maintain control of the vehicle.

“And then _you,”_ Delphine continued. “‘We’re okay! Don’t mind us!’”

_“Stoppppp,”_ Cosima laughed, pulling over in the nearly deserted parking lot of a frozen yogurt place. “I’m literally gonna crash the car,” she panted.

Headlights off and car in park, Delphine took Cosima’s hand at the wheel.

“Let’s go get some froyo,” she whispered.

Cosima’s grin widened—the ‘r’ _tres Americain_ in ‘fro’ always tripped Delphine’s French tongue up, but she appreciated the effort. “Okay,” she whispered back. “But let’s get it to-go.”

“Well, of course.”

 

“Str—strawr—can you…” Delphine trailed off, slipping her fingers through Cosima’s at the brightly-lit frozen yogurt counter and looking nervous.

“Of course,” she whispered. To the cashier, Cosima continued, “Strawberry lemon, please. Aaaand blueberry for me, please.”

“Sorry.” Delphine rested her chin on the top of Cosima’s head. “The ‘r’ words still trip me up—”

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Cosima soothed, running her thumb down Delphine’s wrist. “That’s what I’m here for.”

The cashier coughed conspicuously. “Your total’s gonna be $5.73.”

Feigning embarrassment for Delphine’s sake, Cosima broke away and reached for her purse, but Delphine stopped her hand. “Let me. After all, I did almost kill you.”

“You almost kill me every damn day,” Cosima grinned up at her girlfriend.

“Yes, but you know you love it.”

 

Ten minutes later, they sat in the backseat of Cosima’s car, back to back and feet up on the seat, because what other way would anyone eat frozen yogurt?

“You haven’t heard from Northwestern yet, have you?” Cosima asked, taking a spoonful of something bright blue into her mouth.

She felt Delphine shake her head, waiting a moment before speaking. “Maybe I’ll just go to l’Université de Montréal. I mean, if I can’t even order a frozen yogurt without help, how am I going to survive at an American school…”

Cosima knew that Delphine had only applied to the francophone school as a backup, but was well aware that her true aspirations lay in the prestigious American universities.

“Delphine, don’t talk like that,” Cosima said. “This is, like, the entire reason you guys moved here. So that you could go to, like, the crazy-good med schools here.”

Delphine groaned. “That’s what I’m talking about—I’ll never get into Stanford or Johns Hopkins or UChicago if I can’t speak like a normal person.”

“So fucking what?” Cosima gestured with the hand not occupied by yogurt. “So you can’t say ‘strawberry.’ Who gives a shit? You’re the smartest, most able candidate they’ll ever come across no matter if you sound like the most French person on the goddamn continent. So don’t give me that bullshit about strawberries because you can speak better than half the kids in our class, and you’ve only been here a year. Every college will be _begging_ for you, so don’t you _dare_ settle for some French-speaking school just because you’d be more comfortable there.”

In her frustration, Cosima didn’t notice Delphine rest her head on her shoulder, or feel her slide her fingers through her own.

“What did I do to deserve you?” Delphine said quietly, nudging Cosima’s neck with her head.

The corners of Cosima’s mouth twitched, all feelings but warmth dissipating. “I ask myself the same thing.”

“I don’t know how you do it. You just...manage to take all my doubts and make them disappear. Cosima, if I had been with anyone else when that pastor showed up, I would have been terrified. But when I’m with you…all that disappears. It doesn’t matter if my words aren’t completely right, or—or if the entire world is watching.”

Delphine could hear the smile through Cosima’s words as she spoke: “I remember the first time you came to Jefferson, and you went around to everyone you saw like ‘Allo! How are you?’” she playfully imitated Delphine’s accent, then shook her head in disbelief. “God, I fell so hard for you. Every time you’d raise your hand in AP Bio, I’d wonder, you know, what was going on in that head of yours. Everything seemed to be, like, life or death. You were so determined to understand absolutely everything. And then we got to be lab partners, and I was like, holy shit, this is it.”

Delphine giggled, playing with Cosima’s fingers. “Do you want to know what was going through my head?”

“Hmm, come to think about it, probably something to do with microbes or CRISPR,” Cosima teased.

“You know, you’re probably not that far off,” Delphine laughed. “No, no, it was when we did that lab in AP Chem and I absolutely could not tell if you were flirting with me or not.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No! French people flirt so _differently,_ and of course I’d never really flirted with a girl so I had no idea if you were just touchy or _really_ into titration—”

“I thought you were into it!” Cosima protested, turning her body and prompting Delphine to do the same so that they could face each other in the backseat.

Even in the moonlight, Cosima could tell that Delphine was blushing. “I was,” the blonde girl admitted. “God, you made me question everything. And you’re right, I wanted to understand _everything._ Especially you.”

Cosima cocked her head. “Me?”

Delphine nodded. “You just…moved and spoke with this grace and confidence I thought I could never have. I was drawn to you and how much you seemed to get me, you know? Nobody had really understood me like you did.”

Cosima grinned, unable to control her expression. “Well, I guess I totally misread the signs because I thought you were totally for-sure into me.”

Delphine hung her head in mock shame. “Yes, yes, I remember that night at the library. In the study room.”

“How could I forget?!” Cosima exclaimed. “You left! Did you, like, walk home or something?”

“I did.” Delphine grinned at the memory. “But no matter what I did I couldn’t keep you out of my head… How your lips felt on mine, your fingers on my skin… In the end, you can’t ignore biology, right?”

In the darkness, Cosima had moved closer to Delphine. “No,” she said solemnly, “it’ll come back to bite you when you least expect it.”

Delphine swallowed hard, her face only inches from Cosima’s. “Have I ever told you how much I love your eyes?”

The brunette girl just grinned.

“They’re like little stars, little brown stars that want to know everything there is to know,” she said softly. “And the way you look at me, like there’s nothing else you’d rather see…”

Their lips met in the darkness, Cosima cutting off Delphine’s words with warm lips and soft, deliberate hands.

“I love you,” Cosima breathed. “So much.”

_“Je t’aime aussi, ma belle Cosima.”_

 

“Are you both ready for your biology tests?” Mr. Cormier jovially interrogated as Cosima dropped Delphine off.

_“Oui, Papa,”_ Delphine assured him, glancing at the grinning Cosima. “We’re both very well prepared.”

_“D’accord,_ well, thank you, Cosima for ferrying her back.” Mr. Cormier turned to Cosima.

“Of course,” Cosima smiled. “Well, I should get home. Mom’s cooking meatballs.”

“Okay, bye, Cosima!”

“ _Text me,”_ she mouthed to Delphine with Mr. Cormier’s back turned, and, happier than she could remember having been in a long time, Cosima bid, _“Au revoir!”_ to the Cormiers and maneuvered her way home.


End file.
